


everything changes.

by crystallyzing



Category: Elder Scrolls, ジョジョの奇妙な冒険 | JoJo no Kimyou na Bouken | JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
Genre: AU, Crossover, Elder Scrolls - Freeform, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2021-01-13 06:43:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21239870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crystallyzing/pseuds/crystallyzing
Summary: even daedric princes. especially daedric princes.[ crossover au. please dont come for me about the lore i am faster and looser than todd himself youve been warned ]





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> HI this is a thing based on AU RP threads with my lovely gf red and i decided i wanted to write a longform thing of it. hopefully someone else out there enjoys. warnings will change eventually

Four hands worth of stinking and mealy mud smeared across his face isn’t enough to teach Caedryn that he hates Cyrodiil yet. That would come later.

Grit and slime and blood come hissing through his teeth, his hands swinging like claws to fight against the arm of the boy holding it here. His face is above him, a wicked and gap-toothed smile rendered shadowy before a brilliant honey-golden sun and a perfect sky. He searches out the approval of his friends, whose laughs swing about him like a storm. Cobblestone bites into his shoulder as he’s shoved into the ground.

"Come on, Elf!" The boy's voice, croaking and horrible, rings above him as he flails, "Go on and dig up some grubs to eat. Just like back home!"

Caedryn feels his lungs begin to scream as _Ash-face_ stabs into him from all directions. His feet churn and thump uselessly against the ground as his chest sucks for air. His gaze trembles when he finally resists just enough. The world swims. His mother is nowhere. Adults pass by – none are her, and none spare much more than a sorry little glance as they hurry on. One of the bulky hands reaches into the windowbox by his head and shoves more mud atop the rest, smears it across his cheeks and over his eyes. Another round of echoing cackles spins around him. Caedryn’s heart pounds in his ears.

The smile continues to gape above him as he’s held down, teeth in the mud. “What, do you wanna cry?” The rest of his face is shoved down and Caedryn hisses, his legs flailing against the boys atop him. “Cry to your stupid Ash-face gods, why don’t you?”

He feels the older boy’s foot punch into his gut and he wheezes. His heels dig in to that tender place between his legs and his ribs and he turns to the rest of his fellows, in a voice that’s thick and drippy with falseness and pitying, “Oh, lads! The little savage is gonna cry!”

The boys around him follow his lead and break out in obnoxious blubbering, which only makes his eyes hotter. He reaches up blindly and pulls the windowbox, only to feel it snap in his hands. Dirt and flowers and its hard wooden corners tumble down over his back, and the boys around him cackle.

“Watch out, boys! He might slit a pig later and--” Caedryn finally wrenches his wrist free and grabs his tormentor’s ankle until he falls.

That wet and pulsating cracking through his face is a worthy trade to see that expression disrupted, those taunting shouts transmuted into incredulous and childish rage. He gets his other limbs free for only one brief and satisfied moment, but it’s not long enough to crawl over that boy and show him true savagery. That breath is kicked from him like rocks to a ship’s hull, his world wheezing and heaving around him for it.

And then, the blows slow, the blurry and stinging assault of feet slowed to a halt by nothing but a metal creak. Blearily, Caedryn looks up, spitting bitter blood and dirt, searching out the unknown point transfixing all three. There, at the edge of the stony road, stands a boy.

He cranes his head around as the others watch him, as though looking in through a window, the edge of the road acting as a clear barrier so that he may safely consume and observe Caedryn’s humiliation. Revulsion floods over him, and it’s all that he wants to do to grind his face into the earth and to make himself as small as possible against it.

The other boys hiss and whisper to each other as the fourth investigates, knitting together to form a secret wall to hide him behind. Caedryn grabs damp grass and gathers his knees together under his body, and in just a moment is blinded by a crashing kick thumping against the side of his skull. He is sprawled again, cradling his throbbing head in his hands.

Caedryn sees the boy look at him with blue eyes too clear to mistake, but unreadable through the blear of his own. A few rapid blinks clear his eyes enough to discern a thin length of twine dangling from his fist, tied to something unseen. He looks up.

“What are you all doing over here?”

When he can hear again, he pieces together the boy’s voice. He’s younger than Caedryn may have guessed, and he can’t decide if this fills him yet further with disgust, or if it makes him sorrier than ever to see him here. The oldest of them scoffs and turns away already, waving the youngest off with his hand, and he says, “Piss off, Jonedus.”

Caedryn feels the presence of the boy hesitating there. Shame threatens to drown him in a hot flood, but this new boy is merciless and persistent.

“It’s quite mean, you know, what you’re all doing.”

He catches a glimpse of him before his head is forced down, before he can tell him to piss off himself. He’s leaning forward on his toes and craning around to see more. “Why are you being so mean to him?”

The boy scoffs. “Piss _off,_ Jonedus.” There’s a brief pause, and then, deviously, “Piss off or it’s your stupid little brother in the river next, and don’t think we won’t.”

The chuckle which passes between them is now rippled with some trepidation, some tension which is quickly dispelled as the largest of the boys glances between them. Yeah, Jonedus, piss off from one hand, go on from his other. The boy stands there at his invisible boundary’s edge, and Caedryn is walled away again; the boys are on him, and this time, his arms are heaved from under him. The world swirls around him in a dizzying slur as he’s slammed onto his back, skinny wrists driven into the dirt, that weight on his chest as drying mud squelching in little fists.

And behind them, the boy looks on with bright, round eyes.

No sooner does he bend down and stand back up with the other end of the rope – some great contraption, the size of the boy’s own head, flanked by a pair of dented and painted discs, metal bent to form the shape of horses attached to a cart. He makes his way over solemn as a procession, unobserved by the boys – so absorbed in their games – and by Caedryn himself, busy choking on bitter and gritty mud.

Jonedus the Boy approaches the group from behind, and before he’s noticed, he cracks the wheel of his chariot against the largest boy’s head. The largest of the boys crumples with a whining cry. The smug pleasure in the air is disrupted immediately. The clammy weight of those hands lifts immediately from his wrists, and Caedryn is released.

He rolls away, spluttering mud and dirt, into a patch of grassy and uncovered overgrowth. His fists press into the grass as he hunkers in. There is a tangle of feet and legs he can see from the ground. Youngest Jonedus is the most solid of all three against the other two, unmoved before the Imperial boys but to stamp forward and shove them back with twice the force. One tries to grab his chariot toy and is promptly kicked over. The oldest of the three tormentors stands, and sets his sights on Jonedus, snarling. He takes one step toward the boy and he stumbles immediately to his left, tilting and whirling until he hits the road in a tangle of limbs.

The scuffle ends almost as quickly as it was started. From what little Caedryn is privy to, it takes only a few well-placed blows from the youngest boy before the other two busy themselves with a retreat, taking the boy with the hurt head with them as he groans. Caedryn presses his chest into his knees, and he watches the final boy from the window between his arm and his ribs.

Young Jonedus’ hands clap against himself in three brisk passes over his body, dusting himself off, clapping his hands together as a farmer might after conquering a day’s worth of weeds. His feet trample on a few steps, clumsy and dawdling. He bends down to pick up the slackened string from the road, and the little vehicle turns to follow him.

He turns and walks nearer again, and fear wells in Caedryn’s gut like a cold cave spring. The absence of his former tormentors is suddenly deafening as Jonedus approaches his huddled body, the wheels of his toy creak with each little jut and dip of the earth below. Caedryn stays frozen and coiled against the grass. He wonders if he’s ever hungered so for solitude as he does now, sniveling blood and mud, shivering to himself.

“Go away,” It drools from him in a low and shameful growl, pooling in the grassy shoulder of the road.

“You can get up now,” Jonedus says presently. “No one’s here to bother you asides me now.”

Caedryn feels a scream welling in his chest. He takes fistfuls of grass until he hears them rip like his own hair. The human boy waits still. His hand bounces hard off of his thigh, sending the string in wavy little ripples as he waits. He rocks from toes to heels.

Then, wordlessly, the boy steps over him, tugging the chariot over Caedryn’s body.He would grab that wheeled toy and smash it against the road if it didn’t mean surrender. The toy’s wheels track little ditches up his ribs and across his back. It tumbles down at his other side. The boy giggles and squats down to set it right again.

Caedryn feels stale, warm air hiss through his teeth. He spits hot blood against the back of his hands as he hisses out, “Go _away._”

“Well, it’s no wonder for certain why those boys all had their feet on you!” The boy prattles right along, light and sunny enough to boil his blood. He steps over his curled-up form again, too quick to be caught in the swing of his furious hands as he pulls his toy over his back after him, ”They must have thought that you were the road!”

Hot tears finally flood his muddy cheeks at this last insult, red flashing in his eyes, and the rest of his restraint is reduced to desperate shreds. Caedryn unfurls himself with a cry harsh enough to fret against his throat like rope. He leaps at the boy’s legs, blood and mud gushing through his shivering teeth as he grabs and claws and strikes.

His fists thump uselessly against the legs of Jonedus, who remains steady as an oak and just as firm in the face of Caedryn’s wild thrashing. The bubbling little giggles tumbling down from above burst into laughter raucous and free and wild before Caedryn notices them beyond the sear of his own anger. Longer still for him to realize that the sound doesn’t insult him as it should.

The fight slows to a struggle, slows to moody stillness as he takes the sound in, so unlike that of the boys before, hailstones traded for a sun-shower. Bitter tears well in his eyes, and stinging air singes in his chest in uneven gulps of air. Jonedus’ head lowers blithely, blotting out the sun in exchange for a new one which threatens to wash him clean. He thumps his fists one last time into his toes, and then smears his face against the linen sleeve of his tunic. “What’s so funny?”

The boy pays the question no heed. “Do you like my toy? It’s a chariot. The wheels work, too.”

Caedryn looks up glumly to see fat little fingers pointing to two figures wrought from iron, twisted from the very metal, paint worn and chipped away by love. Jonedus crouches down until he is nearly seated.

“This one’s Pelinal—” Figure number one, with half of its face chipped away, and then to figure number two, larger but mangled by a crater in its left shoulder, “—and this one is Umaril.”

Caedryn snorts blood and mucus and gritty mud as grimy tears track through the filth smeared over his cheeks. “It’s not. Pelinal Whitestrake would never.”

“He would.” The boy points again, as though the chariot itself is unmistakable proof. “He is.”

“No.” Miserable sludge creeps into his throat and he splutters out a wet cough. Caedryn smears thick wetness from his mouth and his nose over the back of his hand – brown and red smear across his slate-coloured skin to become blacks and grays and purples. He scowls. “That’s just pretend, and you should stop it. Because… Umaril is a bad man, and Pelinal hates him, and—so they would never _do_ that. Not _ever._”

“It’s _my_ toy, and they’re who _I_ want them to be.” Spoken as bright and sunny as the day around them, and too unaware of Caedryn’s misery to anger him. The boy straightens himself up and lets the sun touch his gray skin again. “You want to play with it? You can get up and pull it, and then they can be whoever you want.”

He begins now to wonder how long he would have to stare at his scraped knuckles before the boy finally shows him mercy and gives up. The shadow of him doesn’t move. He looks up glumly to see a hand held to him. He takes another careful look at the chariot, wrong without apology.

He smears a warm slurry of fluid across his palm’s heel, and to his dismay, the boy is undeterred by the unpleasant squish between their palms as he grabs him.

He’s hauled to his feet more than helped. Jonedus looks at the mess in his palm and laughs again, that big, cackling laugh, before he smears it in turn across the leg of his pants.

But just before that chariot string is pressed into his hand as promised, he feels another desperate tug at his shoulders. He’s pulled up and away by long, thin hands. He sees Jonedus’ eyes go round and wide as he stares far above his head and steps back.

“I leave you alone for just one moment! You’re filthy!”

He can barely answer before he’s ripped around and facing his round-eared mother’s disapproving scowl, though his vision swims far too much for him to properly take it in before he steadies himself and sees it’s since melted into something else entirely, something far more contemptible for Caedryn than simple anger.

His mother is concerned.

Her face goes pale. Words pass quiet under her breath as she gathers the hem of her dress and wipes away blood turned black against his skin. His nose stings with her urgency and his hands lift to scrabble against her. It’s never much use with his mother, of course - he turns and her long, long fingers catch his face, turning him back.

“No, let me see--” He hears Jonedus shift his feet behind him as his mother scrapes his face clean. “Who’s done this to you?”

Caedryn grunts out his displeasure as his hands try again, pushing against her knuckles. He hears the chariot shudder and clank its way backward over the cobblestones as the boy steps back, but his mother is on him. Her gaze flits toward him and narrows appraisingly.

“Was this your doing?” She holds her dress’ edge against Caedryn’s bleeding nose as she demands, driving snot and mud and blood back into his throat, making him splutter and shove at her hands again. “Answer truly, now. Grown-ups always can tell when little boys lie.”

Because her son would tell her, of course. Caedryn is shrewd enough to understand that trick, and he prides himself for a sliver of a moment that secret grown-up knowledge.

Jonedus the Boy, meanwhile, seems shy and bewildered suddenly, shrunken by the presence of his grown-up mother. He hears the rapid rasp of his neck against his clothes as he shakes his head.

“No, Miss.”

There’s a moment of fleeting silence as they both pause, Jonedus’ attention bobbing between the two of them and Caedryn’s mother appraising. Jonedus steps forward until Caedryn can just barely see him emerge from the corner of his vision. He scoops his blobbed chariot from the ground and swings it at nothing.

“I got them.”

His mother’s eyebrows raise as if she doesn’t believe him. Caedryn spits into the dangling hem of her dress, curling his mother’s lip and freeing his tongue a little bit.

“He goddem, Mum.”

His mother, less impressed, sighs.

“He got them.”

She repeats it in an exasperated gust of a breath. She shifts the hem of her dress in her hand and swabs the mud away with a clean edge. “Right. Well. My thanks, though perhaps you ought to refrain from doing such getting in the future.”

The boy is clearly adept at dealing with grown-ups. He nods, holding the chariot far too close to his chest to swing. “Yes, Miss.”

“Good lad,” She finally, mercifully, releases the edge of her dress from his face and gives her son a top-to-bottom. “You’ll need another bath now, most certainly.” She draws her arms around her son and scoops him up, away from Jonedus. He looks smaller now that he looks down at him from her height, his toy on the ground, his hands together in front of his belly. She hikes her son against her chest and looks down at the boy below them. Immediately, he takes a few waddling steps backward.

“Whose boy are you, then? Who are your parents? It’d only be proper to extend our thanks.”

A careful smile curls at the boy’s lips, which perplexes her. Caedryn feels her smile back and he scowls.

“All right, then, cheeky. Where do you live?”

“The farm.”

“Bear Creek?” She’s found out his game, and Caedryn can’t quite tell if he’s pleased or not for it. “Truly? We deal with the Pinettes now and again. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen children there.”

He smiles again, bright and playful. “They make us work all the time.”

“They make you work all the time?” Word by word, her voice grows fonder, and Caedryn finds himself wishing he could be anywhere else. She bends down to ruffle his hair and he peers intently over her back. “Good lad. We’ll have to be sure to bring you and yours something nice, won’t we?”

With that, his mother turns away and walks down the road, somehow refreshed. “Such a nice boy.” She turns to press a kiss into his ash-white hair. “Wasn’t he a nice boy?”

He watches the boy and his chariot wave goodbye until he disappears. He doesn’t answer.


	2. 2

Without Jonedus the human boy and his chariot to draw her attention, Caedryn’s mother is now fully focused on him. He nearly wishes she had been charmed so that, convinced that she needed a mortal son instead of an elven one, she had decided to scoop and fuss over Jonedus instead. 

She sifts through his silvery hair as though it were ash, breaking apart clumps of mud caked into it. Caedryn does what he can to shut the world off - her fussing, the memory of the boy and his chariot, the throbbing headache trapped in his head. The eyes of disapproving passers-by. 

Caedryn’s mother thinks the bliss of youth still shields him from them, that he is too young to understand what it is their looks mean, that his age blurs his vision such still that he sees no differences between the two of them when he looks to her. She is right, to a fashion, though the shield slips day by day. Already, he begins to understand just what the sternness in their eyes and the tightness in their lips means to tell him.  _ Too old, _ a woman stern with judgement says as she lays eyes on his lanky limbs, his ruby eyes narrower, his cheeks higher and his jaw sharper than the screaming mortal children flanking her.  _ Too dark, _ says another young man, his eyes bobbing between Caedryn’s charcoal skin and his mother’s mortal peach as though the connection between them might become evident if he searched the two of them out.

His mother’s fingers ghost over that tender swell, and his efforts fall to pieces. The warm afternoon falls around him, golden and sunny and perfect except for him. He grunts sharply and pushes her hand away. He’s too late. Her steps slow down to investigate, fingers prodding the swelling as tenderly as though it were an eggshell. He grabs her hand again, but is shaken off.

“Oh,  _ stop _ it, will you,” commands his mother. Caedryn scowls and tries to turn away to no avail. “Would you  _ please _ tell me who’s done this, sweet? Your poor head is bloody!”

Disgust boils like bile in his throat. “No one,” lies Caedryn.

“ _ Some _ one has.” She huffs as she hikes Caedryn against her. His stomach lurches and twists. His little wooden walls lie in shambles, and his mother encroaches further. “And I would very much like to know who, please.” He presses his cheek into her shoulder and grasps at the bodice of her dress until his fingers dig into his palm’s heels. 

“ _ No  _ one has!” The words lurch up his throat like bile. He doesn’t need to see her face to feel the immediate and sinking regret as she withdraws from him, the heat flushing to his cheeks. Her hand stops moving and her steps slow below him, and for one stubborn moment, so does everything else. He feels her breathe in, and then out.

“Fine.” He catches the gaze of an old man, his face sour with disapproval and one last spur.  _ Too wild. _ Her hand covers his face and blots it all out. “Fine. You’ll not have to give any names if you don’t want to, then. Just answer truly, son - was it grown-ups who hurt you like this?

Finally, Caedryn breathes. He lifts his face just enough to turn toward her throat again, his brow knotted in stubborn indifference. “No,” He answers truthfully.

“Then all right.” She relaxes then. There’s a foolish moment where he truly believes this to be the end, and the perfect and golden shine of the afternoon fades back to warm his edges as she picks up her former hurried pace toward the store. 

“Was it other boys?”

He sits in her arms and hopes that she’ll forget she asked, but of course, she doesn’t.

“Caedryn?” Maybe a little longer. “Caedryn.” No, the sun withdraws from him again, and there is his mother, sieving his fine and silvery hair about as though that were the only thing that could stand between Caedryn’s innermost thoughts and her discovery. “Sweet, answer true. Look at me.”

He doesn’t look at her. She adjusts her hold on him until he is forced to, stopping in the street.

“Look at me, now,” She has his face in her fingers before he can turn away. Her eyes have all of the unbearable warmth of the brightest of Sun’s Height’s days, inescapable and all-encompassing. “You tell me. Did the other boys hurt you like this?”

His mother has some mercy which those most brutal of days lack - his lip quivers, and she softens for it. She releases his chin, and allows him to wait in comfortable silence on the walk back to the store.

The door is still locked, which relieves her, but the figures dawdling close and slow as moths frets her as soon as she approaches. Caedryn wraps his arms around his mother’s neck and looks away.

“Oh, Mister Gravius,” He feels her voice through her chest as she addresses her waiting customers, lighter and kinder for them, “Your forgiveness, please. You may all come in, but I shall need but a moment. My boy’s had a hard time and I must see to him.”

He feels the unforgiving presence of old Sergius without having to see it, cold enough to chill even this temperate afternoon. He sighs harshly. Already, Caedryn thinks he can hear how age has made his jowls leathery in his breath.

“Marenia, we’ve been waiting out here a bleeding  _ age. _ ” Caedryn feels heavier in his mother’s arms for the coldness of his voice, as though each word froze him piece by piece. His daughter, Selene, is there to abet his cold with a gentle elbow to his side, which makes the old man grunt.

“Oh, no, please. Take your time. We’ve no rush.” Selene is sunnier toward his mother than her father had been, the last point lowered doubtlessly in the direction of her old father. 

Somehow, though, Caedryn hates her even more than he hates him when he feels her crane over his slumped shoulder, beaming with that over-helping of sweetness she seems always to have for him.

“Hello, Caedryn!” Her voice drips with it - a loathing sweetness. “A lovely day to be out, isn’t it?”

He grunts at her. 

Hurriedly, his mother opens the door, and bids them all inside. His mother’s steps below him fall onto the wooden floors of his family’s store. Oaken floors and walls painted the colour of cream. His mother had insisted that it opened the store up to have the walls so light, and Caedryn always nodded in the most wizened way he could and pretended that he understood what she meant. The walls always looked quite solid and closed to him.

Tables line the walls, lain with fabric, clothing, pitchers, a pair of iron calipers which have gone thoroughly untouched for as long as Caedryn can remember. His father, for what little time Caedryn had known him, had prided their store for its inventory, the widest-reaching in their fair little town, encompassing a little bit of everything. This pride had passed to his mother, who stocked her shelves and tables with all that the smallfolk asked of her.

In the middle of the room stands a table like an island, lain with food, vases and plates and slouching bags of wheatmeal, flanked with standing shelves of books and knickknacks. Sunlight panels the floor directly before his mother, streaming in from the window above the door. Another window lets it in, across from the staircase, which stands guarding the rest of their home from his mother’s job. Against the creaking stairs is fitted a wide counter, which bends around and opens toward the back of the room and is lined with a sparse little collection of motley chairs and stools. Set on the counter are scissors and thread and other such merchandise, a cashier’s till. Bolts of beautiful fabric stand behind it now, where his mother frequently sits sewing while she waits for customers, altering and fixing and creating alike.

Caedryn sees the shadow of the old man’s bald head intrude in the doorway before he sees him properly. His mother hurries toward the counter and sweeps the stiff apron from the counter. “Please have a look-around,” She cries over her shoulder as she bustles away toward the dim kitchen, “I shan’t be long!”

Caedryn hears a young man’s voice shouting from the doorway, “Might my jacket be mended yet, Miss Marenia?”, before the girl Selene’s voice hushes him. She continues to rush around the cold hearth and pushes the door to their little bathing room open with her hip. She edges in around the wooden tub and pushes the door back in with her foot.

“Right,” Her voice has that private hardness to it once again, and Caedryn leans in for its comfort just as she kneels down to deposit him on the ground, “You’re big enough to undress yourself. Wait in here, sweet, keep the door closed, and I shall draw your water. Okay?”

She seems in most cases to be accustomed to his moody silence, which suits Caedryn well. She pushes his sleek hair from his forehead and kisses him there before straightening up, looming in the farthest corners of the room to reach up to the high little window. She forces it open and props it with a length of wood, handed to her by Caedryn. She smiles before tying her apron tight at her waist and bustling back out, shutting the door behind her.

Caedryn cracks the door open just enough to watch her light the hearth. The face of a young woman shyly pokes around the corner to beckon her and back Caedryn goes, pushing the door shut like a gust. He holds it shut with his back for a single, tight moment.

Nobody comes in after him. He exhales, satisfied that the border of his private little world has held, and peels himself from the door. Caedryn looks to the squat little stool and rests his hand on the waist of his trousers, unlacing their front with careful, stubby fingers as he walks over.

That’s when he sees something glint in the light. He looks to the open window.

There sits a butterfly, sunning its long-tailed wings. Curling feelers bob in the wind. Caedryn softens his steps as he watches the thing. Its wings are sharp and long, entirely unlike the friendly yellow flutterers he often sees zipping across the street and over local blossoms. This creature is paneled in sharp black and brilliant as stained glass, glimmering sea-glass turquoise and lavender so brilliant that Caedryn nearly mistook it for an abandoned gem. They fold up to join above its back, casual and slow, thoroughly unconcerned with the boy below it. It lifts one of its many shining black legs up to brush its antennae down flat, and they spring back up.

The creature is tiny and magnificent, full of poetry beyond his youthful reckoning. And Caedryn hates it.

He slaps the heel of his shoe against the stool and watches, but the butterfly hardly reacts to his warning. Slighted, Caedryn slides his heel from his shoe and holds it in his hand, sole brandished. He throws it. It slaps against the sill, and the butterfly briefly takes off, dancing about in the dust motes, aimless and jittery. A gasp swells in his chest, and he crushes his back against the wall. 

The little thing whirls about in the air, long wings tailed and fluttering in the air behind it, swooping this way and that as thought caught by the wind, though the dark little washing-room provides none. After a time, it swoops through the bottom of the sunbeam. Caedryn drives his feet into the ground with a frightened yelp as he watches it move, shoulders baring further into the wall. It dances down and alights gently on the lip of the bathtub.

A silent, silent moment passes between them in the washing-room. The shopfront buzzes through the wall behind him as he stands there, resolutely silent, his mother’s voice sailing high above it all. The sound doesn’t help him find his voice. Every time his lips quiver with words, or he takes a breath to speak, he feels it stolen from his chest by the threat of those wings. 

When the silence becomes too deafening to stand, he swallows.

“Go,” the boy tolls.

The butterfly is unmoved. 

Carefully, Caedryn peels himself off of the wall and stretches as far as he dares. He leans forward until he is bent over his toes and nearly totters over. Caedryn catches himself and stares ruefully at the glimmer clinging to the edge of the tub.

It takes him a moment to scrape himself together again. He takes a breath and tiptoes forward, extended until his hand is the only thing close to it. He gives a brisk wave. The butterfly’s window-pane wings flutter carelessly in the gust of his hand. 

“Go away.”

Its feelers bob, as though they could taste his words. Its wings shiver in that incidental, sickening way, together and then apart, soundless and effortless. The butterfly ignores him. Caedryn’s courage is depleted and he retreats back to his wall.

Perhaps it didn’t understand. Caedryn’s head drops between his shoulders to gauge the space between himself and the tub. He takes a breath, and he holds it in his chest. “Shoo. Shoo!” 

If it did understand _shoo_ before _go,_ then it didn’t care much more for it. It wipes down its antenna again.

Tensely, Caedryn swallows. He inches away from the safety of the wall and readies himself again to scatter it with his hand. It trembles before him like a flag carried by the wind. 

His finger brushes it’s wing. The powdery fuzz of its gilded surface coats his skin in a horrible instant.

He yelps and yanks his hand back as the butterfly is knocked aside, shaking it in the air like a burn. He presses his back into the wall until he feels it in his breath, steadies itself by the edge of a thin beam running from floor to ceiling. 

The butterfly catches itself at the edge of the dry tub, its wings flailing for balance. Leg by miserable leg, it squirms its way back over the tub’s edge. His stomach boils. Caedryn scrubs that powdery buzz from his fingers until they sting and then bursts into the kitchen.

Caedryn hurries under drying herbs and hung birds, padding his way past his steaming bathwater. His mother’s name is in his mouth until he bursts into the storefront. There it dies when he sees her, standing with another woman at the doorway.

As he has so often when others find his mother’s door, Caedryn freezes. In one of the woman’s hands is a bowl of crops. Tomatoes, some eggs, green leaks.

In her other hand, her gasping mouth.

He stares at his mother’s back, her dark curls bundled at the top of her head. He strains to hear an explanation in their lowered voices. She just nods. He hears one scrap from the two of them, and what colour Caedryn had drains from him when he does.

“Oh, the poor dear,” She steals the air from his chest to breathe it out, as soft as the morning, harsh and fretted with breathlessness. “The poor dear.”

He brings his hand to his cheek to feel his own skin. It all happens slowly. Two other legs make themselves known behind the skirt of the farmer’s wife, short and small. Something creeks and clatters against the steps of the shop. Little hands gather her skirt and push it against her leg to make room for the face of Jonedus the Boy, clueless and blithe to the secret he now doubtlessly holds. His eyes, wide and roving, take in the warmth of the shop, all of the wares, the smells, the open walls.

And they do the one most potent cruelty they possibly could. They settle on Caedryn, secret and filthy and gray, forgotten in his misery in the glum doorway.

He smiles at him. He can’t stay.

The farmer’s wife only just notices him before he turns away and tears back through the kitchen, past the butterfly and its washing-room, blind in his terror. Caedryn flings the door beneath the stairs open, flies down them. He finds the darkest and coldest corner he can and squeezes himself into it. His voice shivers in his throat.

Ruined, ruined, ruined.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> none of u are gonna believe me but things will start happening eventually


	3. 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bet you all thought i abandoned this, huh.
> 
> finals and holidays held me back too long so now u all get an extra helping of nothing happening. hope u enjoy
> 
> e: ive also decided to update the character tags as they come up in this au, as they've been changed a bit from canon and might be tough to spot. ill delete these tags if/when some fall out of relevance

All that Jonedus can think to tell his poor mother, after a square’s worth of despairing silence, is this: “I  _ told _ you I didn’t do it.”

Erina Penitus looks down at her son, exasperated. A wheat-coloured lock of hair escapes her bonnet and hurries down her shoulders. He keeps his eyes on the ground as he walks, his hand in hers, kicking the road. She sighs, and with her other hand, tucks her hair back into place.

“I suppose that you did.” 

She hardly wants to concede. She knows what happens to his head when she does, but she can hardly avoid the obvious now - she had been wrong, and he had been right. Erina had dragged him to that door as he protested his innocence, and all at once, it had been proven right before her eyes. It’s not something that she can ignore in good conscience. The boy trundles along her side for the time, so unsatisfied that she can feel it through his palms.

A moment of uneasy silence passes between them. Then, Jonedus looks up at her cautiously.

“Can I have my toy back now?”

Erina’s lips press together. “And why should I allow a thing like that?”

He puffs up in his chest, and she can hear the smug righteousness in his voice as he presents his sterling case: “ _ I _ wasn’t bullying.”

“No, Jonedus.”

And then she glimpses him deflating in an instance, as though her  _ no _ had been a needle jabbed into him. “Why  _ not?” _ Outrage boils from him.

Cooly and calmly, she answers him, “You still hurt those boys.”

“They were bullies!” His foot stomps at the next step. “They were hurting first!”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“But it  _ does!” _

“The answer is no, Jonedus.”

“This isn’t fair!” He huffs like a little bellow, as though that might be the end of it, though Erina knows it isn’t. He slows to a trundle to irritate her and she wraps her thin fingers around his hand and yanks him to her pace. He grunts, displeased, and kicks dirt too far in her direction. It spatters against her dress like thick raindrops. She soldiers on.

Then Jonedus rears his foot back and kicks a stone toward a little flock of hens. The man who owns them shouts as they scatter in a frantic, flapping little storm of white and sand coloured feathers. Jonedus uses the moment of numb humiliation to yank his hand from hers, but his mother is less absent in the wake of it than he might have thought. She grabs his arm.

“So sorry, Sir, I am  _ so _ sorry,” Erina rushes her apology over his shoulder as he runs to gather his chickens. Jonedus slapping her hand. She sinks her fingers into his arm and drags him off as he whines, loudly enough to draw yet more eyes, “you’re hurting me!”

“Enough,” She spits as she hauls him away from the road, toward the wheel-gouged earth of its shoulder, “That is e _ nough _ .” 

“Stop it!” Jonedus plants his heels into the carved-out dirt only to feel it crumble as he’s yanked through, swept along in his mother’s angry pace. A few brisk steps from the road’s shoulder and Jonedus finds himself dragged before her, thin fingers biting into his arm. Erina kneels and yet rears over him, her fingers sharp in her shoulder, white skirts pooling around her. Erina fixes him with a baleful eye.

“Shush.”

Jonedus scuffs his hand against hers. “No!”

His mother shakes him so abruptly he gasps. She hisses again, her voice rasping against him like rope; “ _ Shush. _ ”

Jonedus gasps for air. His hands clench at his side until his palms sting. Slowly, the gazes of other passers-by fade from his awareness, and the only eyes on him with any weight are Erina’s. His mother manages to push all of them away.

Her lips press together until they flush white. “You will  _ not _ carry on like this.” She jostles him again by his shoulders to emphasize that ugly word -  _ not.  _ Other than that simple and earth-shaking motion, his mother is as still and as stern as a statue, fixing him with eyes that seem never to move. There is no room for Jonedus in the silence, and it makes his chest feel as though it’s shrinking. “Do we understand each other, my son? You will  _ not.  _ Not ever again.” 

His lungs surge with another drowning gasp, all of the words he could protest her with replaced by blackness, an endless vat of ink in which he is dropped. He feels his cheeks grow hot as he stares at her, paralyzed, until he can take no more. 

The blurry shape of his shoes is much easier to stare down than his mother, unblinking and unimpressed. Something about this discomfort softens her fingers, and the world begins to edge back in around him.

“You helped that boy.” She sighs it out, finally. “You were very brave. For that, I am proud of you.”

It only makes him angrier. She was angry at him for what made her proud. He drives a knuckle into his eye grumpily, and before he can open his mouth and jump back into that black ocean, her hand is under his chin, and his face is upturned. He stares at her sullenly as she continues: “But you hurt those boys all the same. That was wrong of you.”

His chest surges for breath again, dragging it wet and sniveling through his nose. He’s miserable. “I helped him.”

“You did. You helped him by hurting them.”

Weakly, Jonedus stomps his feet.

“Jonedus,” Her hands loosen from around his collarbone and smooth out his shirt. “You helped him by hurting them. Does that make it right?”

“Yes,” Jonedus responds, sour with urgency.

His mother stares at him with that golden look, the way she always looked when she had something profound to say. The words seemed to brim from her. He could be sick.

Her hand leaves his shoulder to right the collar of his shirt. “It isn’t so simple. Not for a boy like you.”

“Why?”

Erina busies herself with his second button. He had fastened them himself that morning, and button two had been slipped into hole three. Its slit gapes awkwardly at his chest.

“Tell me this, Jonedus,” She pops his shirt open button by button, with one hand and less effort, and Jonedus allows her, for he’s still at that chubby stage of his childhood where he’s more baby than child, and such things hardly embarrass him yet. “Were these boys bigger than you were? Or smaller?”

His chest puffs a little, and he unapologetically swans, “Smaller.”

“Smaller.” She repeats it with a withering sort of blackness. “Right. And had they anything like your chariot to hit  _ you _ with?”

His eyes fall down again to the wagon tracks at his feet. “No.”

The perfect motion of her hands slow, and he can feel her summing him up with her eyes. “Then you hurt boys who were smaller than you with--”

“No!” He doesn’t care what he’ll see when he looks up, himself added up and approximated in the shadow behind his mother’s eyes - he snaps his head up in indignation. Her eyes widen and that reflection is extinguished for now by the flash of his anger. “There were a lot! He was smaller than all of us!”

His outburst has sapped the energy from whatever his mother was about to say. She sighs, forever exasperated, and rolls the words in her mouth as she reaches the top button.

“Jonedus,” She says as she slips the last button in the hole. “You’re a strong boy. You’ll be a strong man. But do you know what else you are?” He scowls at the treadprints at his feet, but he still feels her smiling at him. Her hands are insidious and warm on his cheeks, and his face is turned up to feel her motherly warmth breathed across him directly. 

“You’re clever.” She bestows it upon him like a gilt sword, like a gift. “You’re very clever, Jonedus.”

She lets it sit there like something splendid. Jonedus’ nose curls at its stink. 

If his mother notices his reaction, she makes no mention of it. Her gaze sails effortlessly through it and fixes on something out of his reach. The longer she looks at it, the more her smile fades from her face. 

She speaks after a moment, slow and clear. “You are strong, Jonedus. Like so many others, you are strong. That certainly makes such situations simpler to deal with. But you must not neglect your mind. You can speak well, and you can think well. You must not forget this.” 

Her hands smooth down the roundness of his face like tears, and she is up before he can ask any more questions, and her hand is in his.

— 

The old wizard upturns the velvet sack and out spews a number of smooth tiles.

Caedryn’s getting taller now, so he doesn’t have to stretch so far to overlook them. Little stone tokens, the size of his childish palm, all polished smooth. They are etched severely, as though the runes were carved there by a sword. The old man sits back and sticks the slender neck of a long pipe into his shaggy beard, and he watches him with careful bemusement.

Caedryn marvels at them. They were the colour of Azura’s lavender skies and etched in black. “What are they?” Caedryn asks.

The man’s gaunt cheeks puff, and a cloud wisps from the well of his pipe. “Divination stones,” He answers, his voice like the scrape of slates of stone. “They tell the future.”

Caedryn glances up at that. “How?”

The pipe slips from his mouth and he uses its shining mouthpiece to tap one carven piece. “Each and every one of these etchings, little elf, is a different word of the language  _ Dovah _ . The dragon’s tongue.” He leans back in his creaking chair again and rests the pipe on his tongue, folding his other hand over the stomach of his colourful robe. “They can be read and interpreted to divine the future, you see? Each, eh-- character, each etching.”

Caedryn stares down at the stones again, and he contemplates this. The wizard chases a jewel-coloured butterfly away with a swat of his knotted hand. He points at one three-lined scar in the stones. “What’s this one say?”

The old man doesn’t need to search his memory at all. “ _ Denara, _ ” He responds around the mouthpiece of his pipe, “It means  _ strengthen. _ Perhaps there will be times coming through which one will need to persevere, or perhaps one will undergo a great feat of training.” 

He lets the translation sit for a buzzing moment before appending; “And, of course, perhaps -- when coupled with other stones, in a reading -- it could enforce the meaning of other words.”

Caedryn finds a new one, one far more complicated. Curved lines, crosses, dashes of black. He taps it with his finger. “This one?”

The old man has to lean forward and peer. His wild and shaggy brows hang low as he reads it. He takes a careful moment before giving him the translation: “Poison.  _ Kuoko. _ ” He sits back once again, this time grunting. Slowly, uncomfortably, he elaborates; “Trying times. A malignance like death, literal or figurative. Loss, slow, slow loss.”

Caedryn’s face twists. “How much?”

“Twenty for a set.”

“ _ Twenty _ gold?”

The old man’s eyebrows lift at his disbelief. “We have no discount for looking, I fear, for the sake of the young wizard.”

His frown doesn’t seem to change the old man’s mind, but before he can open his mouth, something else in the teem of the market crowd makes noise for him. Clatter-clatter-clatter.

He doesn’t know why his head lifts so immediately, but it does. The old wizard watches with bemusement as his head snaps up and, hands still on the table, his head whips this way and that. A silvery curtain of hair flops loose from his ear and he pushes it back with his hand.

Caedryn gives up on the table here. He keeps his hair pressed back as he stares, carefully, at the cobbles. He looks for chips of paint and rust flecked away in their crevices, and he looks for those wheeltracks thin as knives, muddy and bumbling footprints. He strains his ears and walks off into the crowd without a second thought. He drives himself through the teeming din of villagers after the ghost of that boy, the trace of him as fragile as a candle’s flame. 

He hears a clatter of wheels, occasionally. He hears him laugh, that ridiculous sound. He pushes others into their tables as he passes under them sometimes. 

He drives forward until he’s faced with him. There sits Jonedus, at the painted cart of a traveling puppeteer. He’s laughing at the jigging dance of the wooden figures on stage - ridiculous and too loud for his little body - as though he has never seen it. He claps his hands as the story continues, riding the voice of the old puppeteer like none of the children around him.

Caedryn weaves himself back in as though he were the tail of a finished stitch.

—

A few days after seeing the wagon, there he is again.

Caedryn stands in the doorway of the bakery, flooded with its smells and its warmth. There Jonedus the Boy is, basking in all of it, laughing with the old baker, as though he were the baker’s boy and not the farmer’s boy at all. He’s given a sticky bun. He takes the hand of a dark-skinned little Redguard boy who makes Caedryn sick with something green and vicious. He tugs him toward the door just as Caedryn whisks himself out.

Outside, Jonedus the Boy tears the bun in half. He gives the little Redguard boy one half. He cries because it’s small.

Caedryn walks in rushing little steps and knocks into Jonedus, catching the torn corner of his half so that it falls into the dirt.

—

Caedryn can hardly think of many things he might be more loathe to hear on this brisk Fredas afternoon than the voice of Jonedus the boy, high and annoying, bawling out; “You’ve got moons on your face!”

He freezes, reaches up to cover those ash-white crescents on his cheeks despite himself, and he turns, and there is the grinning face of the boy. Triumphant as a cat sat before its own spew. He narrows his eyes at him and turns, head high, and marches away.

Clatter clatter clatter follows his every step. The boy is beside him in moments. Caedryn keeps his hands on his cheeks.

“I’m called Jonedus,” He announces.

Caedryn responds, “You make me puke,” and continues alone.

—

It’s the twentieth of Sun’s Height, and today, the guild of merchants declares that the sun rests, and so too do all merchants rest with it. The store is closed today, and neither Caedryn nor his mother have work to do for it.

A day without any reason to leave the safety of his home, without mandated interaction with strange faces  _ within _ his home, is usually the one most treasured to Caedryn. He shuts himself in his room with his wooden toys and his books and his own mind and he wiles twentieth after twentieth away couched by the safety of solitude.

This is until he hears that voice, high and loud, rising above all others and wafting in to pierce the sanctity of his bedroom. The noise pulls him by his ears from his wooden soldiers and horses, and before he knows it, he’s spending his Sun’s Rest kneeling on his bed, nose against his window’s sill, peering down at the source of his discontent on what’s supposed to be the best day of his whole year.

He sees the unmistakable top of his head, brown and fuzzy and cow-licked, and bent over his flour-sack boy. A bright little creature suns its wings on his finger as the smaller boy laughs. Contempt crawls its way over Caedryn’s shoulders as he watches them trade amusements for a moment. The butterfly flutters off into the sky and Caedryn ducks further behind his sill. He hears the high murmur of Jonedus’ needling voice, and he peeks back over. He can nearly look into the smaller boy’s large and dark eyes, though he can’t see him. The flour-sack boy chews on his knuckles as he nods, and then Jonedus’ hand extends from below his head to grab his drier hand, and they continue bobbing along the street.

There are very few things that would force Caedryn to burn his Sun’s Rest at the stake. He barely even heeds his mother when she asks, with some confusion, just where he’s going in such a rush as he tears toward the stairs and flies through the deserted shop-front. He bursts through the shut door and runs, bare-footed, to catch the backs of his tormentor. He is gasping for breath by the time he finally intercepts the two of them, his feet slapping the ground as he stamps himself in place, firmly in their path.

Jonedus the Boy rakes those vacant crystal eyes over him, his sagging sleepclothes, his flushed face. The hurried rise and fall of his chest.

And he has the audacity to, in response to all of this, smile.

“Hi.”

The boy in the flour-sack looks up at Jonedus with round, black eyes, still gnawing on his knuckles.

Rancor rises in his throat like bile. Caedryn marches forward and, with all of his strength, shoves Jonedus backward. The boy stumbles and falls backward, rolling on his shoulders, then falling with his back flat on the ground. The other boy clutches his fat baby’s hands in front of his chest as Jonedus’ is removed from them, startled. He looks between Jonedus and Caedryn.

Jonedus rolls himself upright eventually. He stares at Caedryn in that classically blank fashion he has. Then, damn him, he smiles again. A little chuckle burbles from him. Caedryn’s never wanted to kick another boy quite so badly.

But a shuffling of smaller feet than his distracts him. The flour-sack boy has approached him, and Caedryn, deathly afraid of his infantile silence, puffs his chest and scowls down at him. The boy doesn’t back away as he might have hoped. Instead, he jams his tiny hands into him in as hard a shove as he can manage.

Jonedus’ ocean eyes are round with wonder when he looks back. “You’re not good at being mean,” he observes.

Caedryn dashes back home and slams the door behind him.

—

The bookstore has long been a post of sanctuary to Caedryn, the only refuge he’s found outside of his bedroom. None of the boys who tormented him ever followed him into that smell between every page, that of freshly-cut trees and sawdust and sunshine.

And nor did they have the courage to pass the threshold of the shop and cause trouble under the sullen-eyed watch of the one who owned it - a silent, broad-shouldered Orc man, thick tendrils of hair beaded and bundled at the back of his head in patterned silk, boar-like tusks set in his jaw, piercing amber-brown eyes under his low brow. 

None of that scares Caedryn, who himself is found frightening by the community’s adults. He and the bookkeeper have an understanding. The bookkeeper enjoys in quiet spiting the snot-nosed Imperial boys by nothing but his imposing appearance, and Caedryn takes refuge within his shop’s book-lined halls and read quietly by candlelight until he can safely begin home.

Sickeningly, Jonedus the Boy seems to have friends everywhere, and not even his bookkeeper sanctuary is safe. The bell at the front door jingles and the voice of Jonedus the Boy fills the store to its roof, speaking to his bookkeeper guardian as though they were old friends, and Caedryn’s time with the folly of Chance the thief is ruined. He peeps around the corner of the shelf just as Jonedus asks the bookkeeper for  _ Mum’s book, please, _ and the Orc bookkeeper nods and disappears from his counter.

Sadly for Caedryn, he can’t manage to disappear into the books before Jonedus catches sight of him. Caedryn shrinks away and opens his book again as his slapping feet jog closer and closer.

“Hi!”

He doesn’t look up. Not even as Jonedus walks close enough to shade his page. Caedryn cringes away.

“I’m  _ reading, _ ” He says it down his nose, a sneer rolling through his words. Still, Jonedus’ fingers find their way on the book, and Caedryn has to turn sharply away.

“Go away!”

“I want to see.”

Jonedus’ last words to him floats back into his thoughts. He sets his red eyes on him contemptuously, and hisses out, “You probably can’t even read, anyway.”

Triumphantly, he turns back to his book and sticks his nose in. The silence sinks around him. Jonedus, before him, is still.

Over the edge of his book, he hears him. “Take that back.”

He looks up to see him still standing there, his face dark and severe.

“You take it back now.”

Caedryn stares at him, and as the bookkeeper returns to his desk, Jonedus turns promptly and runs from the shop, snatching the book up on his way to the door.

The bookkeeper stares at Caedryn over the rim of his spectacles until he leaves to apologize.

—

“Watch,” Jonedus breaks from the sharp-eyed owner of the chicken flock, raking his gaze over both boys in equal measure as he runs toward him, smiling with his painted-on eyes. “Watch this. Come here!”

“No,” Caedryn sighs, but his hand is scooped up anyways, and he’s dragged over to the pecking hens. The man watches carefully from his seat on the porch as Jonedus stands with his feet apart behind one speckled hen and wraps his hands around her wings, pinning them to her side. He lifts her from the ground and her head jerks up, beak shut, her head twitching from side to side to let each pebbly eye get a good look at her captor.

“Here,” He beckons Caedryn over with his chin. “Hold her up.”

Caedryn approaches, hands outstretched, and hesitates. “I don’t want to.”

He can only barely hear the cinder-rasp of the man sucking flame through his pipe.

“Come on.” Jonedus edges in against Caedryn to work the chicken between his hands, and Caedryn stoops down without understanding why. Soon the chicken is held, upright, between his dark hands. It twitches and flutters in his hands. He can feel every tiny movement.

“I don’t want to,” He repeats.

“Just watch!” Jonedus, grinning, rushes out in front of Caedryn and his chicken, and squats. “Hold her low down to the ground, down here.” Caedryn lowers the bird in accordance with the wormy tap of his finger in the dirt, and she fixes one shrinking pupil on it. He brings her down until her scaly legs fold underneath her body. Her wings shiver underneath his hands.

“Now look, my dad taught me.”

He’s grinning as he takes his finger, sticks it in the dirt, and draws a trail directly before the hen. It goes dead in his hands. 

He never quite forgives him for how his triumph turns to blank surprise as Caedryn, holding a limp chicken, begins to shriek.

—

It is the early days of Hearthfire, the very last of the beery and golden days of the summer months, and Caedryn has just made his very first purchase from the shaggy market mystic.

It’s a wine-coloured velvet bag of polished runestones, trimmed and tied with gold. Caedryn has run his fingers across their polished surface for many Loredas afternoons prior. He had admired them for all of those market months before today, when the old wizard finally relented and agreed to take his handful of Septims for their exchange. 

It’s a pittance. Caedryn thinks it must be. The old man had seen him, a little elf boy, nearly every market day, goggling at his array of shining stones and magical tools. Caedryn had seen it in the creasing corners of the man’s face as he smiled, that pity. It’d make him sick if not for the bag of glossy tiles in his hands. They are ocean blue, with runes gouged in gilded gold, and they immediately become Caedryn’s most precious belonging, forever cold and smooth as glass. 

He has his hand in his bag even as he walks now, rubbing one stone between his thumb and forefinger, trying to guess at which character the carvings must spell through the pad of his thumb.

Jonedus, of course, understands exactly none of their arcane significance.

He trundles along beside him, barefoot and filthy, the constant clank trailing behind the two of them. He eyes the bag in his hands suspiciously. The passing months have treated them quite differently, and only when he looks back at Jonedus now does he truly see how much kinder they have been to him.

He carries imminent manhood more gracefully than the Imperial boys around him, and far moreso than Caedryn, gangly and long-legged and alien. His arms and legs had stretched out before the rest of him like rolled clay. They both have in common their stretching height, and neither of them seem done with growing. Caedryn has always looked odd when next to the youths of Cyrodiil, and never quite as strange as he does now. But Jonedus too stands out next to his fellows, wild and tall and broad, his cheekbones high and pale. He feels more and more as though he isn’t truly alone next to Jonedus when the village mothers fail more than three times to guess the age of  _ both _ of them.

He gathers strange looks now, Jonedus and his chariot, looks which Caedryn has grown to hate. But as he sees the cut of his cheek against the distant mountains, the way his strange eyes narrow, he finds an understanding for them. 

He heads Jonedus off before he can open his mouth, “They are  _ not _ Daedric.”

“They do look like it!” He pouts at the velvet bag.

“They’re not!” Caedryn yanks his hand from it and lashes the sack tight. “You say it again and I’ll kick you!”

Jonedus huffs unhappily, and continues for another few steps in silence but for the impatient slapping of his bare feet against the warm path. “What are they, then, anyway?”

“They’re the dragon language,” Caedryn announces presently.

“Dragons don’t  _ talk. _ ” announces Jonedus, wrong and just as confident.

Caedryn feels the headache gather behind his eyes like a knot.

“What are they for?” Jonedus continues to probe, clueless. “Are they just funny rocks?”

“They’re diving stones.”

“They’re  _ what? _ ” He can hear the confused snarl in his nose even before he looks at his face.

“Diving stones!” Caedryn repeats impatiently, “Divingation stones! They tell the future.”

The two of them depart from the path and embark upon the untrodden grass, which rises under their feet. The chariot clatters tightly behind them as its lead is pulled taut by the hill’s incline.

“Diving-nation stones,” Jonedus repeats, and but for the way that fracture grates on him, he seems to do the merciful thing and accepts Caedryn’s knowledge on the subject.

They’re about halfway through their climb when Jonedus asks, “Can you do my future?”

The question surprises him, alerts him to the pedestal under his feet that he never knew he’d stepped onto. A fuzzy thrill passes through him. He answers, “Maybe.”

“Please?” Above the crest of the hill rears a massive and gnarled tree, crowning its top as they climb.

Caedryn rattles the bag, and even though he gains on Jonedus in the giddy thrill that threatens to close in on him, he answers as mildly as he can; “I’ve never done it yet."

“I’ll be practice, then! Please?”

Caedryn’s fingers are already working on the gold lash pinching the bag shut and rushing for the dappled shade of the tree. He sits against its trunk and rummages his hand into the little bag.

“I’ll pull one, and I’ll tell you what it means,” Caedryn explains as Jonedus approaches and settles on a lumpy root next to him. He produces the handwritten parchment from the wizard and remembers all that he had told him about this cypher for the stones and their meanings. “It’s supposed to just be a clue.”

Jonedus nods in the corner of his vision, and his face flashes with brown hair as he stares down at the handwritten guide that Caedryn is pressing carefully into the dirt. He weighs it with a gray stone.

Now, Caedryn looks straight to Jonedus, his strange eyes and his sharpening face and his broad shoulders. He takes a slow breath. “All right,” he intones, with all of the mysterious importance he can muster, “I have to focus. I’m going to do it now.”

Wordless, suddenly enraptured, Jonedus looks back at him and nods again. Caedryn tries not to smile as he stirs his hand into the smooth stones, presses his friend into his mind until he has an imprint of him he can feel as he works.

When he feels the stones are good and mixed, he mumbles, “Here we go,” and takes one between his fingers and pulls it into a spot of sunlight.

The surface gleams like the ocean. Caedryn looks at the carved lines in its surface, their intersections and sharp edges. The lines are unfamiliar to him. He shifts his gaze to the sheet of paper below in a way that he hopes isn’t too noticeable to Jonedus.

Okori.

Caedryn breathes, curiously, “Power.”

“Power?”

Behind the stones sits Jonedus, brow knotted and low in contemplation. He wraps his hand around Caedryn’s and pulls the stone to his face to see it for himself. “What’s it mean? What sort of power?”

The question turns him to rain and yanks the pedestal out from under him. “I don’t know,” He mutters to his toes, defensive and shy. He pulls his hand free and replaces it and the guide in with the rest. “It’s just a silly clue, anyway. Maybe it’s... something powerful. Or someone.”

Jonedus sits back and chews on this a moment, nonplussed. Then, suddenly, as Caedryn ties his bag shut, he turns back toward him and smiles. “Maybe I’ll be the Emperor.”

Caedryn holds the knotted lash in his hands and feels the words slip away from him. “I don’t know. Maybe.” He wishes suddenly that he could slip away with them.

“Won’t you do another?”

Caedryn swallows and recedes into the tree until he feels every knot stabbing into his back. “I don’t want to.”

“Oh, please, Caedryn!” He leans forward so sharply that his hands slap the dirt. “I want to know if I’ll be the Emperor!”

“I said no,” Caedryn repeats himself and tucks the velvet bag under his arm, gazing instead of at Jonedus at the village below them, “Maybe later.”

“Why not?”

“Because!”

Jonedus stares at him then, for a time. Caedryn feels his eyes on him.

Then, without loosening the grip of his gaze for even a second, he snatches the bag free and flees the tree with it, Caedryn’s arms stretching stupidly out after him.

Numb surprise floods Caedryn, and for a moment, all that he can do is sit and watch as his bag runs farther and farther away. Jonedus turns back at the sunlight’s edge.

“I’ll give them back!” He calls to his gaping shock.

Caedryn can feel his legs trembling underneath his own weight before he realizes he’s stood.

“Give them back!”

“I’m going to! I promise!” Jonedus’ fingers pick at that golden knot as he steps backward, away from Caedryn’s wrath. “I want a better one!”

“That isn’t how they work!” Humiliation pits in his gut. Panic seizes his throat. He’d been stupid. “You can’t just pick one!”

One step, and his legs start churning under him. Jonedus wheezes as Caedryn punches into him. “Give them back  _ now! _ ” Caedryn claws blindly for the velvet bag, and Jonedus’ hand immediately shoots high into the air, holding it aloft.

“I will! I just want a better one!”

“You can’t--” He tears at the flesh of his arm and is blotted out by Jonedus’ palm in his face, and his voice blurs into a hot shriek. He claws upward like a drowning man.

He hears Jonedus’ voice shouting something or another above his own before the world starts spinning. Blue sky, green field, black impact swirls around him. The rasp of grass crushed and hurtling open air, the thud of the earth raising to pass him down assails his every sense. Stones embedded into the hillside thump his arms.

Jonedus slows to a starfish stop at the bottom of the hill before Caedryn does. Caedryn manages to roll further, though, his head nudging his friend’s bare foot before the swirling of the world finally slows.

Caedryn manages to scrape his limbs underneath himself before Jonedus can even roll over. He spots his bag of divining stones, still stubbornly clutched in Jonedus’ stiff hand, still drawn shut.

Jonedus groans, and Caedryn looks to him next, full of renewed rage. He crawls through the nauseated haze and drops his fist into his gut like a rock. He feels him wheeze under his fist and feels glad for it. He lets Jonedus cough and spit into the grass.

When he finally gets bored of this, he declares grimly, “That’s your fault.”

Out of the spattering comes, “It’s yours.”

Finally, Jonedus’ head lifts like the neck of a dying flower. He’s nearly smiling. Caedryn almost hits him again but finds his fist caught by Jonedus’ hand, fingers around his knuckles. “Power,” he manages to wheeze.

That word sits with him for a moment before he connects it to its dragon-tongue etching. Okori.

He tries to resist the way that absurdity almost transmutes the nauseating dizziness, infects it with something pleasant and silly. Something giggly. He scowls to smother it. He clenches both of his hands so tightly that they shake and his fingernails bite into the heels of his palms. He frowns and frowns and frowns at Jonedus’ smile, loose and natural and nearly incidental, dopey from their tumble.

But the smile, like the ones his mother proudly won, creeps up on him. He feels the silliness at the hill’s bottom loosen his every muscle. His neck can’t hold his head anymore, and it lowers until it rests on Jonedus’ stomach. The whole of him shivers with repression even as the joy rears through him.

He can’t stop the bubbling giggles intruding on his bitterness. All that he can do is turn his head until they’re safely swallowed by his shirt, what few manage to escape his spite-locked throat. He presses his face into Jonedus’ stomach, and he laughs.

He trembles with those wild giggles he couldn’t kill for a time before he realizes just how still and silent the rest of the world has become in his sparking amusement. He peels his face from Jonedus’ stomach. He’s faced with a numbing, deafening silence.

Wind ghosts over the grass around them, flashing the verdant fields pale, cold gold. Everything else is still, and nothing is stiller than Jonedus, and now it’s Caedryn who finds himself mobilized by idle and stupid joy before a silent observer. The quiet yawns between them as Caedryn stares back, his eyes cringing in the effort to contain that warmth threatening to overwhelm him, and all they have to stare into is Jonedus’ gemstone eyes, wide, impassive, completely still. It almost wipes him clean.

But there is instead one last defiant burble of dizzy silliness, and another smattering of laughter manages to escape him.

Jonedus blinks as though a new star had just been born. Caedryn swallows an apology. He feels bitterness settling back into the cracks of him. He glances down to his fist - blanketed by the peach-pale of Jonedus’ own hand.

He slips his hand from underneath Jonedus’, and his wrist is snatched next. He’s close enough to steal the breath from him when Caedryn looks up again.

He holds his gaze until they’re close enough to touch.

It’s a brief thing. As quick as it is fragile. His breath is against his cheek like a ghost. He thinks for a fleeting moment that he can feel his pulse through their lips. It’s over by the time he has the sense to wrap Jonedus’ dusty shirt in his fingers like so many knots, and there they are again. Jonedus’ painted eyes are all that are in the world, and they look nearly as stunned as Caedryn feels. Jonedus stares as if what had just happened had happened  _ to  _ them, some strange and secret happening.

Finally, Jonedus releases his gaze and blinks. Caedryn watches Jonedus drown in the silence he himself had become so comfortable with - his gaze roves, wild and desperate, seeking explanation in Caedryn’s face. His mouth opens and closes, his hand gestures uselessly for words forever out of his reach.

Before Caedryn can speak, Jonedus’ jaw snaps shut, and the clicking bag of tile-shaped stones is shoved into his hand, and Jonedus slides himself free and runs back up the hill to gather his chariot and flee down its other side.

The day is cold again, and save for the cream-coloured set of wings fluttering precariously nearby, Caedryn is alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next part was supposed to be here instead of this one so its like.....90 percent done. hopefully shouldnt be as long of a wait as this one was but neways thanks for reading if u made it this far


	4. 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 🥴 im never promising anything ever again
> 
> also the formatting of this chapter is a mess for some reason and i dont know why ugh!! i did my best to fix it ugh!!! UGH!!! ENJOY

Erina still remembers well the shock on their faces, when she told them.

_ A boy? _ , they had cooed when they first met him, as though a boy might as well have been some mythical creature, friend to the unicorn. The look the ladies had exchanged when they thought she wasn’t paying attention. They had thought Erina civilized for a hedge witch, and of course, considered the raising of fatherless little boys tantamount to fairytale child-stealing. 

She remembers how she had had to hide her prickling as they reminded her, gently, like the mother hens they were, how  _ rambunctious _ little boys could be. How  _ energetic. _ How this fat-cheeked little boy would fight her, eventually, when he grew to have his own little thoughts and his own little opinions. They didn’t need to call her crazy for her to know that she thought her so for inviting this little Oblivion-born creature into her home without the stern hand of his father, with only a woman and the soft heart of her crippled brother to help her keep the house in line.

She begins to wonder if they didn’t have a point about little boys now that she looks at Jonedus, beloved thorn in her side, seething at her from the other side of her workshop, standing over what once was a decoction of lady’s smock leaves and pulped monkshood root to help Sabine’s little girl bide through her fever. It now sizzles uselessly in the air.

She doesn’t say anything. She strides carefully but briskly, clearing the fizzling mess of glass and medicine on the stone floor, and she snatches him by his arm as Sohraq gnaws away at a yellow-fleshed apple and drools its juice on her shoulder. He shrieks in her ear as she composes in her head the letter she would write to the orphanage, to inquire if they needed any  _ little boys _ .

He fights her, as little boys are apparently meant to. He latches one strong hand on the doorframe and she struggles to keep her balance. Her arm aches under his solid weight as she wrenches him free, and he spits and shrieks and curses and grabs her braided cord of hair as her other child watches quietly, peaceful and doe-eyed. She composes her address, tries to grab for the name of the old marm who owns the establishment, gauges just how she ought to word herself as Jonedus lashes against her. How would the old maid be flattered?  _ Kind lady, _ perhaps?  _ Sweet Mara-Sent Saviour of Mine?  _ And how to write of him.  _ Spiteful little viper _ was far too unkind if she wanted her to take him from her bruised arms - was  _ spirited _ the kindest way to describe him? 

She thinks on just how quickly, how precisely she could pen this letter and have it in the old hag’s hands as she shoves the door of the boys’ bedroom open with her foot and plops him down on his bed. He kicks himself off and she swoops him right back in. Her mind wanders again to her letter as this cycle continues, every paragraph perfected, every carving of her quill clear and fresh in her mind, as though the side of her palm could still smear it.

She takes the younger boy outside with her and shuts the door, and it beats at her back as Jonedus crashes into it, pounding his skinny fists against the door. She holds it shut until it stops, and she tempers the words written in her head with each thud of his fists -  _ restless _ becomes  _ fidgety _ becomes  _ active _ as she feels his hands thump through the wood.

When he’s tired himself into a bellowing heap, she walks off, brisk and silent. Sohraq’s eyes, large and dark and silent, crawl over her as she carries him away to Rodderic’s bedroom. She deposits the boy on the floor and sits at her brother’s writing desk, her skin throbbing with bruises. She plucks a sheaf of blank paper and lays it before her, and dabs the flamboyant, gilded quill her brother insisted on. She takes a breath and watches the shiver in her hand.

She survives a moment, to her credit. 

One moment of her boy pounding against his door for her before her neck wilts, and she lets her head sink into her arms.

  
\--  
  


Caedryn had burst into tears the very moment he arrived back home, but that wasn’t so bad. The store was busy, and these were the sharp, quiet sort of tears that he always found so easy to hide.

Caedryn shut the door softly, kept his wet eyes to the floor and his ears tuned to the murmur around him. His mother’s high voice penetrates through all of the rest, as it so often did, but she is not near the front door. She is at her seamstress’ counter, speaking to the bookkeeper about his torn overcoat. She has it lain across her lap, spreading the fabric to gingerly examine the hole as the bookkeeper nods his massive head intently. It’s too easy for Caedryn to float like a ghost up the stairs to the safety of his bedroom. There, he can let his guts sink out from him and spill across the floor in dignity.

This was before the first frost, and he has seen no sign of Jonedus the Boy since.

Caedryn has glimpsed fragments of him, certainly. Flashes of brown hair here, a boisterous tear of laughter there. A child just tall enough to outpace the others around him is enough to turn Caedryn’s head, to flutter him for one brief and breathless moment before it slips between his fingers like smoke. The other boys rushed to fill the image left by his absence, and without fail, all are a disappointment. None could be the boy he felt under his hand that day, and the illusion falls apart.

Some days, the days when the apparition of him was doubtless in its realness and in how purposeful its flight had been, Caedryn would contemptuously say that this was all  _ just fine with him. _ He felt it well in him when he caught eyes with him and knew him, when he knew those eyes and their singular and uncanny reach, feels them reach him. He feels it run him through when he steals the wind from him when he finds that only Caedryn’s face seems capable of erasing the permanent smile on his face, and when he turns on his heels and away from him. These are the days on which Caedryn would find it perfectly agreeable to never see Jonedus for the remainder of his long and lonely life.

It’s the days when he sees a pair of brown eyes, or shoulders too narrow, or cheeks just slightly too low, or when that boy-figment of him vaporizes before he can identify or eliminate him, that he feels his absence like a cold tear of wind, and that makes Caedryn regret this unfair expulsion most bitterly. These are the days when the quiet tears come back.

And this is why, in the cool middle of Hearthfire, his mother has no choice when he weaves through the few browsing folk bustling through her shop and presents her a slice of bread, stiff and mottled and dead.

She sighs, picks the knot in her apron apart, and slaps it on her counter.   


His mother tours the kitchen and compiles a short list of necessities before she whisks him out the door by his hand, stumbling him across bleached cobbles toward colourful tents and stalls.

Such mid-afternoon excursions have rarely been loved by Caedryn’s mother. He isn’t sure the bread would have purchased the outing so easily, had it not been for the weeks stringing between the hill and today. She never savours these afternoons spent shepherding their son away from those tents dyed deep-purple and embroidered with moons and stars, those tents where gleaming spell-sellers and wizards peddle their trinkets, tripping over her son fingering warm gems and enchanted baubles as he clings to her skirts, and doubly while customers loiter in her store.

But he had been moping, and thus, she had to. The pity isn’t something that he relishes, but it gives him a chance worth debasing his own dignity for - that being the chance to find Jonedus the Boy again and tackle him to the ground and rip out his hair by the handful.

Caedryn scans the crowd as soon as it begins to form for that face, the ground for his galloping little chariot. And no matter how many times his mother trips and gently pries him away from her side, she dares not separate him completely. The inky bruises may have long healed, but they’ll be forever fresh to Marenia. Her boy won’t be left to fend for himself in the dirt anymore.   


His mother knows Caedryn’s pace is more impatient through the market today than it has ever been, and she is tripping more than their usual count. She cannot, however, fully understand why. He tugs her from stall to stall. Wherever his mother’s feet are is where Caedryn finds himself, tangling her, bobbing his silver-haired head against the basket on her arm, tugging her into the trail of brown-haired little boys who always manage to be wrong, until he finally does just what his mother most feared. 

She tugs him along to the left just as Caedryn is rocketed across her to the right by a flash of reddish-brown hair, tangling in her legs and overturning her basket. Fruit and fabric are scattered to the road, and his mother’s hands against the ground.

The wives of the village scatter, but none help. Evil looks and whispering voices surround he and his mother like a round, dark wall. Caedryn takes only one look at his mother before he wishes he could smash through it.

She hooks him by the crook of his elbow before he can attempt it. He is jerked down beside her, and his mother recovers her basket and sets it sharply upright.

“ _ What, _ boy, has got into you?” Hissed into his ear as she grabs her fabric lining and snaps at the air with it. She jabs it against the wicker floor of her basket until he hears the wood crack. The wives whisper their gossip and move along, until there is only one still paying the two of them any attention.   
  
Caedryn’s attention is grabbed by another uproar nearby - a group of grubby boys at a peeling, scarlet wagon, a harlequin puppet bowing in its open window before the mossy curtains are whisked shut. Both panes of its split door open and the children crowd the man who emerges - tall, proud despite his shabbiness, hair as wild and as slick and as red as a fire shooting from a beaten old cap. The point of a beard sharpens his features until he looks vaguely menacing to Caedryn even as he smiles, laughs, stretches his arms to the sky in triumph before being pulled down the half-step by the gaggle. He reaches back inside his wagon and pulls out a frosted sweetroll, which the children greedily snap up. The man watches them leave, leaning on a cane the colour of ivory.

Now that Caedryn has noticed him, he finds it too difficult to unnotice him. He runs his hand thoughtfully along the trimmed roof of his wagon, painted with fading gold. He meets Caedryn’s curious gaze, and then, swallows it.

The man regards him with something appraising, careful but smiling and lackadaisical, like a rich housecat regarding a colourful little bird. As though he were being saved for later. Caedryn stares into eyes that he can’t put a colour to, against a smile that he can’t quite describe.

The frantic and swinging voice of Caedryn’s mother glides back into his world like a bird out of the sun. “My goodness, come, now!” She tugs him closer and presses a bruised, underfed little tomato into his palm. “Come! Be a good lad and help your mother!”   


So accustomed to it already, Caedryn barely realizes that the stranger still commands his gaze. The man’s attention flits from Caedryn to his poor mother, and then, back to the boy, lancing him in place just as soon as he’d thought himself free.

He winks, and Caedryn’s heart leaps into his throat.

The man adjusts his cap and, finally, hops down from his wagon to cross into the bustling causeway.

“Pardon, mum.” He squats on his heels until the soles of his shoes flop down and begins piling odds and ends back into her basket. She receives the help gladly.

“Oh, thank you!” She takes her treasured loaf of bread back from the stranger and folds her fabric over. “How lovely it is to see some kindness left in our good Empire.”

“Even when it come from her outsides, Mum.” The very last straggling gawkers is not lost on Caedryn, sharpened by now to recognize such eyes on his back. Nor is it lost on the stranger, who flashes him a knowing glance from under the brim of his cap as they busy themselves. “Trouble with the boy?”

With each word the strange man speaks, his mother softens, and Caedryn feels his skin turn to real stone. Something electric and cloying-sweet thickens the air around his words. Caedryn sees his mother’s mouth soften at the question and, helplessly, he sighs.

“Oh, sir, no,” She tucks her very last purchase into her basket. “He is a good lad. Just eager, you see. He loves the market.”

“As all children happen to.” The man stands, then holds his hand out for Caedryn’s mother, which she accepts. Caedryn presses his hands into his legs to keep from slapping it as he stands by himself. “Leave the lad here with me, Mum, if you’ve more to buy. All but me job it is to be entertaining the children, it is.”

She watches him apprehensively as Caedryn clings. His mother is the wife of a merchant, and he has taught her shrewdness enough to disarm better conmen than this stranger. She peers through him as she considers it - considers him. 

“Leaving my boy with a stranger and his wagon,” She says, tugging Caedryn closer to her skirts just as he’s referenced,  _ boy, _ “Now, to me, that sounds like a perfect way to have no boy at all.”

“Aye, clever mum, aye,” The strangers speaks it from a grin, but only Caedryn can see that it’s too tight to be something joyful - a tiny detail apparent enough to someone tiny like Caedryn, but something evaded by his grown-up mother. “But if it was I came into the business of vanishing children instead of entertaining ‘em -- why, then who would be left to enjoy poor and lonely Master Theodor’s Tales from the Never-There?” He bashes the ribs of his rickety old wagon with his cane, and to Caedryn, it shivers like something alive.

A silvery cat with eyes as gold as Septims pokes its head through those trim curtains. It shakes its head out and squints around. Caedryn watches the animal as his mother watches his stranger owner, frankly appraising.

“The cost--”

“--shall be nothing which I will let you worry yourself over.” The man stakes his cane into the earth and stares right back, just as frank. “One kindness free of charge -- well--” And the Well comes quick, snapping at the heels of the generosity. He reaches into his breast pocket and flips a shimmering septim to Caedryn’s mother, who catches it easily. “--pardon, mum, nearly free of charge. A pie, if you would. Steak and cheese. Lost me lunch to a pack of guttersnipes just now. The dangers of wagering with children! Serves me right, for even I know that the little ones shall never be allowed to lose.”

Caedryn smells it surging again, that smell, as thick and as sweet as a fire. He wants to vomit just to cover it. “And perhaps even the lad could help me iron out a thing or two with my newest work. Oh, won’t that be something!”

Caedryn looks up to his mother, who stands above him, pressing her thumb into the Emperor’s golden face. She glances to her son, to the man, to the coin. Her lips purse and then relax, and Caedryn knows that the stranger has won.

She glances up. “If my boy is hurt by you. You know what will happen if that wagon of yours is ever sighted here again.

“Can rightly imagine, Mum.” But the way he looks at her dark-skinned and pointy-eared son says he doesn’t quite believe it.

She contemplates him a moment longer before she is finally swayed for good. She kneels down before her son, adjusts his tunic and fixes his hair.

“You be good,” She busies herself as she speaks, turning his collar right-side out, “And you remember what it is I told you, if this man harms you.”

Caedryn nods sagely. “Spit and scream,” He responds, as though the words alone held some power.

“Don’t forget kicking.”

“And kicking.”

“Good boy,” She smiles and pinches his nose. She brushes her skirts out flat as she stands, clutches them until they’re as knotted as her nose. She holds the cap-wearing stranger in her gaze again once she’s straightened herself, watches him stroke his beard like an orange flame.

“I shan’t be gone long, sir, so don’t bother yourself with getting familiar.”

He sees her off with a nod of his cap’s flat cap. “Ta, Mum.” Only Caedryn sees how his lips tighten behind his mother’s back.

The man is plainly ridiculous in his clothing, all patches and garish shabiness. This is little comfort to a boy as precocious as little Caedryn Sepevius. He puffs out his thin chest as the man’s gaze again roves over him, wild enough to wilt the core of him like a flower.

The smell recedes, and the man drops down the length of his cane, revealing its head - the roaring, rich-oaken face of a cat, meticulously carved. He squats on the stairs, and they creak against his weight.

“Hello, boy,” The man’s voice is harder now, the clipping of his words blunt and harsh against the wan afternoon. “Or is it hello again?”

Caedryn barely hears his words for the conclusion he’s come to - “You used magic.”

The man’s head cocks downward, vaguely disappointed. “Hello it is, then.” He stretches his legs, unfurls his knees, passes his cane from hand to hand. Slap, slap, slap. “Well, what a funny thing this is! A trifle awkward, too. Am I truly so forgettable, little elf?”

Caedryn holds firm to his point. “You used magic. I know it.”

“Yes, clever boy, yes.” He seems bruised now, words gushing sullenly forth like a thick, thick waterfall. “Is that what you want to hear? I used magic. Clever little elf. Good boy. Smart little urchin that you are, you caught an old trickster’s parlour trick. Does Polly want a cracker? Is this tripe absolutely  _ all _ that you’re about to ask me?”

It was, in fact, until all of that spills out. His nose twists. “What are you?”

“Ah!” He’s revived slightly, twisting his cane in his hands as he hunches forward, “Now  _ that, _ my boy, is a question! One fit for the young wizard, yes? Yes!” He caps that word with a burst of energy, a jab of his finger so fierce that Caedryn nearly feels himself bowled by the airborne force of it. Wizard.

The stranger pays his young guest no heed, of course.

“I am,” He heaves himself up by his cane and lets the motion stretch his voice until it’s thin and raspy, “what I am, what I am, what I yam. Now, how does that answer this little wizard’s question?”

The theatrics leave Caedryn spitefully unmoved. “It doesn’t.”

“It will. Eventually. If I’m being honest, it’s at least half more than you deserve, little wizard, of that I can assure you.” He’s bent at his waist, leaning half of the way down over Caedryn so that he seems to stretch over him like a birdcage.

“I’m not a wizard.”

“No?” He’s disrupted, almost convinced of it. The illusion is broken and the gray afternoon is allowed to seep back in between the stranger and Caedryn. He considers him. 

“No.” He continues, absent but more assured, stroking his fiery beard as he appraises the boy. “No, I suppose they don’t make them quite so little anymore, do they.”

The boy bristles, and the man smiles for it before he can protest.

“But you are Caedryn.”

This freezes him. He hadn’t quite heard his name in the stranger’s tangled words the first time, and this time is enough to blow him dark. He stares up at him.

“Yes.” This one is sharp at its edges, thin and long and low as a wriggling little snake. Every part of him is dark suddenly, but especially his eyes, their very darkest points fixed to him. “Yes, boy, I know you. I know you better than… well--” He stops, and here is when Caedryn first realizes that the stranger has been encroaching. He stands directly over him, flat on the ground as he suddenly breaks the darkness with a flash like a firefish in his eyes and blows his arms out wide on either side of him, triumphantly declares: “--you!”

Caedryn spites the feeling of his heart in his throat by nailing himself in place, arching his back until his chest curves and puffs out proudly. “You don’t.” He insists lowly. “I’ve never met you.”

“Oh, but you have.” He glides backward and Caedryn can finally breathe again. “You can believe whatever it is that keeps you from soaking the sheets at night, little boy. But know that this much is fact - that you and I?  _ We _ have met. We will meet and meet and meet, and at least once, we’ll dine on some meat  _ whilst _ we meet, and it shall be a lovely occasion indeed. Marvelous! One for the books! My books, anyways. And don’t you hear it from any of the others - mine are the most important to be in.” 

Caedryn’s unease fades to distaste, a hunching embarrassment as he notices the staring the man is gathering. This affliction isn’t helped when the man’s voice drops suddenly, to a low and dramatic thundering.

“Until the Dwarves walk under Tamriel again, until old Divayth Fyr divorces his daughters, until Summerset retires her eyes and ears and Morrowind’s streets are run through with slaves as free as blood shall I remember your name, Caedryn the Wizard. And not a moment before shall I forget! And so-- oh, for the love of--” 

He wheels about in his dramatics, too spry for his thin old limbs, and his wild eyes catch the silver cat lazing on his puppet-stage. He swings back around to Caedryn and, exasperated, claps his hand against the stage. The cat’s head shoots up from between its paws.

“Don’t you hate it when you catch yourself lazing about like this? Here I am, putting on a show, and there I am, ruining all of my own dramatic tension! Humiliating! It’s ridiculous, what I get up to behind my own damned back, honestly!”

Caedryn stares flatly as the man proceeds to scruff the old cat, who squeaks in surprise, and -- pauses. His shaggy brows knit together as the poor cat dangles and kicks its feet.

“All of that I said earlier.” One eye squints until it closes. “About the Dwarves and the slaves and… prattle prattle, yadda yadda-- none of that has actually happened yet, has it?”

“No,” Caedryn answers lowly as the images, conjured fresh, run circles in his head, “And never will they.”

“Well, yes, lad, that  _ is _ rather the point.” He throws the old cat to the ground and Caedryn watches pityingly as it dashes under the wagon’s wheel and out of sight. “They most certainly don’t make you wizards like they used to, do they? We must do something about that.”

Caedryn feels his face redden and his fists clench. He wonders how it would feel if he kicked the stranger in his bony shins. He imagines it would hurt. There didn’t seem to be much flesh to cushion the--

“I wouldn’t, little wizard.”

Sourly, Caedryn exhales. “I hate you.”

“Yes, yes, I’m told that’s quite a regular thing and nothing to be ashamed of.” He rushes beyond this particular declaration, as though it were a fact so plain as to bore him. “Anyways! No more jibber-jabber! You’re here for a reason, boy, and the time – she’s tick-tocking away!”

“Am I.” Listening to loons is tiring work, as Caedryn is finding. Here he finds his legs wearing under the weight of the stranger’s looped and tangled speech, all of the secrets he hadn’t yet got around to revealing. He lowers himself down and plops his jaw in his palm.

“Yes!” He speaks as though no fact in all of the world were plainer, throwing his hands up as though it were obvious enough to be observed in front of them. “Of course! And I should know. I so rarely do things for a good reason.”

The puppeteer eagerly mounts the creaking stairs of his wagon, the groaning weight of his footsteps so that the streaked-silver cat below it is immediately startled, its eyes darting this way and that. It looks to him, and he begins almost to think it seeks an explanation. The cat unsettles him the longer he looks at it.

Caedryn waits a couple of quick moments in silence before the strange puppeteer reappears again, bursting through the earth-green tatters at the little puppet stage. They part with a sharp, quick hiss to reveal the green-painted board suddenly stacked with objects. Trees, tents, a distant castle wall, all cut from wood and painted. Rough twine dipped in bright green drips from the top of the window at the other side, which is set with thick, dark tree trunks and shadowy boulders of the same flat cut.

“Now!” There is the man, arms flown apart, mustard sleeves billowing before he claps his hands shut. “You, boy, shall be of an enormous help with my newest show! It’s a great honour. You know, on your part, being too young for anyone to care much for what comes out of your little mouth.” No matter how Caedryn tries to hide his bristling, the keen-eyed stranger seems to notice – he catches the corner of his gaze and chuckles. “And you don’t have any choice in the matter anyways, so you’ll be going along with it all. Whether you’d like to or you’d like to.”

His nose wrinkles, but he says nothing. Townsfolk move about the wagon as water around oil. He’s right, and something deeper in Caedryn than Caedryn himself knows it.

The man bends then, halfway stooped over his green-painted stage, his face framed by its dressing as he rustles about. He straightens himself up and, with a downward tug of his hands (which Caedryn then realizes are attached to four thin, thin lengths of fisherman’s wire each,) he welcomes two wooden figures to his stage. They swing up above the stage for a moment before slowly, the man lowers them to rest on it.

Something young and boyish in Caedryn finds excitement in their sudden appearance, despite all that has transpired for him to see them and hear the clatter of their joints. The figures are expertly crafted, limbs carved from wood and fitted with joints, creased and chiseled to reflect clothing and armour. They are both of them rooted with hair, painted and polished well. He has only seen such make during his rare trips with his mother to the Imperial City, where buskers jig such wooden figures for the amusement of the filthy children in the streets.

And most exciting to young Caedryn of all is the presence of pointed ears on one of the painted puppets, for such toy adventurers in the Imperial City’s streetside stories were so rarely elven. Despite himself, he wiggles in place.

“Here are our actors, boy.” With a shift of his fingers the two puppets pull their heads up straight and their jaws closed, standing like proper adventurers. “Remember them well! Lifetime friends of Man and Mer.”

The puppets turn to each other, then, and clack their hands together in a handshake. Caedryn takes a breath as his toes wiggle in their soft shoes. The man works the puppets as expertly as they were made, each step smooth and natural and effortless as they travel from castle wall to swampy vines. 

“These two friends travel all across the Never-There, little elf,” A beast arises from below the stage floor, short and fat and constructed of flat wood. A little man with the face of a fish. The movement is uncanny and expert - the warrior puppet dispatches the creature with a slash of his sword, and Caedryn gasps as it falls limp to the ground. “They have many spectacular adventures together! They journey through camps of tall trees and walking dreams and lost time! They untangled the Knotty Brambles! They brave the Howling Halls! They tend the Gardens of Bone! And each adventure only brings them closer and closer as friends.”

Each adventure passes, and the puppeteer’s skill is such that Caedryn nearly thinks the adventurers and their enemies are not made from wood at all. Ghosts, rats, skinless hounds and knotted rope. The adventurers conquer each ill with motion as fluid as Caedryn’s own. Even the world behind them changes - swampy woods become dark stone walls and stilted structures and tents and pedestals littered with bone, all painted expertly on a scrolling canvas. Caedryn watches, enraptured, as the adventurers pass through these horrors.

“But little elf, don’t let yourself grow comfortable!” 

The man’s warning startles Caedryn and he jumps, staring back up at his face, now again visible through the curtained window. “Such was the downfall of our friends! For so busy adventuring they were that they failed to realize what terrible threat they were failing to face.”

The puppets stop, hands pressed into their wooden faces, and so does Caedryn, his breath going backward. He waits tensely as the man glances down his cheek at him, his smirk sharp and knowing.

Before he knows it, the man has produced two hourglasses, gold and silver, shining and beautiful.

“Time. Time! They were facing time itself, boy!”

Caedryn doesn’t respond. His eyes jump between the hourglasses. 

The lack of input doesn’t seem to deter the puppet master’s momentum. “Time, lad. A foe unlike any other who they have ever opposed.” The puppeteer flips the silver hourglass, and Caedryn is left trying to think through how he managed the motion without disturbing either dangling puppets looking on over the little stage. “It’s one that could be stayed for our Elven friend, to a fashion. Such is the way of the Elderblood, that it finds itself impervious to time for the length of many lives of Man.”

And this is reflected, somehow, in the grain-by-grain flow of gray sand from the topmost half of the silver-wrought hourglass to the bottom. Caedryn finds his gaze fixed not on the sand, but on the ruby-red rose blooms climbing the pillars around the glass chambers. Anywhere but the sand. Anywhere but the creasing, grinning face of the old man looming over it all.

“But not so! Alas, child, not so, in the case of our mortal friend!”

As though his edict had been heard by the little beings over which he rules, the darker Elven puppet looks to his friend, who prods at his own chest in cautious and investigative fear. “The only earthbound being Time hates more than the mortal man are the dogs they keep. Time does its wrong against our mortal friend underneath our very noses!”

And before Caedryn can tell him to stop, the puppet master has seized the golden hourglass in his hand and slammed it back down, letting its warm sands flow in a steady, golden stream. Caedryn’s throat closes as the little puppets turn to watch helplessly. The wooden elf clacks as he rushes to the side of his Mannish friend. His thin little arms wrap about his body as he sags.

Caedryn feels his breath go backward. “He can stop it.”

“He cannot. None can stop Time.”

His gut drops as the sand does. “He has to, he’s--”

“How fragile its glass is,” The puppeteer continues, his gaze brilliant with its slow-dawning mercilessness, his smile gleaming like the shorn edge of a knife in the gloom of his caravan, “How easily cut these strings are.”

The puppet’s face goes harsh with shadow, creased like linen. The elf sags further to the ground. Caedryn’s chin quivers.

“No--”

The puppet’s hair, exquisitely plugged into the puppet’s wooden scalp, shining brown, begins to flood with gray, and he’s finally lain on the wooden floor to writhe, as the elf’s face flashes just the same as it ever was, and now Caedryn can stand it no longer.

He climbs to his feet in a rush and declares, voice quavering, “He can’t!”

For a moment, all freezes. The hourglasses, the puppets and their suffering. All but their master, whose bushy eyebrows raise as he regards him. He lifts one pale hand, flat like a plate. Golden sands begin to stream from the air into his palm.

“He can’t?”

Meeting his gaze directly forces him to awareness of his damp cheeks. This turns his blood into rain, his limbs freezing with it. He nearly melts back down to the floor. Instead, Caedryn swallows and fills his chest with air.

He repeats himself, “He can’t.”

His voice is as low and rumbling as thunder. “Then what shall we do?”

A butterfly alights on the stage and suns its brilliant aqua wings. The cat huddles itself under the wagon and stretches its neck, nostrils flaring. The rest of the market has long since fallen away, as frozen in time as the puppeteer’s tormented toys. Caedryn watches the sand pile in the man’s palm, as grim as though he were the villainous Time itself. 

He swallows, and he says the only thing he can think of to say, which is: “Anything.”

The man’s eyebrows, slowly, fall back down over his eyes. He closes the granules in his hand. None fall through his fingers. He holds Caedryn in his gaze, a cage.

“Anything?” The words themselves are all the repetition has in common with Caedryn’s declaration. His words lash themselves around his throat like a chain, its lead leaning into thick, blanketing darkness, and again, more slowly, the rattle of the chain as it moves, “Anything.”

He stares at him, and Caedryn nods before he realizes he’s moving.

Something shifts, then. The stopper is pulled. The puppet master’s eyebrows shoot upward, his eyes light up, his hands are thrown out, sand-free and jubilant, “A happy ending, then!”

The world floods in around him, and Caedryn feels ready to drown. He stares at the old man, bewildered, as he cackles. The moss-coloured curtains pull to a close around the puppets, frozen in their misery. He hears the man thump through the wagon’s bowels before he bursts out the other side. “Now, why didn’t  _ I _ think of that?”

He hops down from the backmost step, and the butterfly flutters away as the rest of the wagon rocks with the weight of it. His head sways and he fixes Caedryn with a cocked smile, lazy and joyful, as he strolls toward him.

“You’ve been a great help, little elf. Invaluable! Singular!” Caedryn finds himself frozen again as the man gets closer, and then kneels before him. He doesn’t feel that he’s been helpful or invaluable or singular. “And this must be rewarded. But first”

He feels his mother’s hand in his.

The gray of the sky settles slowly above him, the tents bled by it slowly around him, the din of people as his mother leads him home. He looks up at her, slowly. 

He realizes she’s been talking. 

He looks down at his other hand and sees it folded around a closed, wooden box, one which he doesn’t recognize. His tongue is still paralyzed as he holds it up to her.

“What’s that?” She absently looks down at him, then through the box, then back ahead of herself, dismissively, in a way that makes him suddenly very tired - “That’s nice, dear.”

She recounts her household purchases as they walk. The box returns to his side and Caedryn feels himself pulled, and he looks over his shoulder.

There stands the puppeteer, or the back of him, fatter and grayer than he remembers. The vest seems to squeeze around his flabby midsection. His head folds into his neck in great, pale rolls. Pale, pale hair with the texture and sparseness of pulled-apart fleece manages to escape his cap, and Caedryn tries to hold onto the glare of copper red he remembers. His profile is corpulent and his nose is bulbous as he swings his conical head around, looks about the square. 

He winces as he embarks on the steps leading to his midnight-blue caravan, steps slow and measured. Caedryn doesn’t even have the time to see him shut the door before he and his mother are swallowed by the market crowd.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> can u believe we're almost at the end of Baby World. can u believe at one point i only intended Baby World to last the first chapter.


End file.
